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Date:      Thu, 1 Feb 1996 16:36:25 +1030 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Cc:        phk@critter.tfs.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Watchdog timers (was: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards)
Message-ID:  <199602010606.QAA22783@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <2257.823145561@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 31, 96 07:32:41 pm

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Jordan K. Hubbard stands accused of saying:
> 
> If you're going to go to all that trouble, why not simply add a
> low-cost CPU and a serial port to it?  Then you could also hook an

68SEC811E2 would be my choice (for obvious reasons 8).  You still need
a fair amount of hardware to bridge this to the ISA bus.

> external modem to it and use it as a full-blown dial-in diagnostic
> port for stopping the system in its tracks and sniffing around (or
> poking at the corpse).  I'd imagine the costs of laying out and
> fabricating the boards would add such a "knee" in the cost curve that
> another $100 in parts for several orders of magnitude's worth of extra
> potential functionality would be a more than reasonable trade off.

$100 in parts would buy you far more than what you're talking about there 8)

> Pyramid did/does something like this for their RISC monsters.  They

Indeed.  Anyone know anything about the trailblazers they used? (I have
one gathering dust somewhere; RMM1800 if I remember correctly 8)

> have a 68K machine driving a color console which provides the fanciest
> interface for grubbing around in the internals of a machine/UNIX OS
> that I've ever seen!  The only drawback to theirs was that they didn't

Hmm, I'd offer the Multimax diagnostics as another winner; they even went
so far as to mandate a VT100 emulation that did 132 columns.  Unless
someone knows where Thomas Westbom is these days, I don't think we'll
get that onto this card 8)

> Needless to say, it would also run FORTH. :-)

Now _that_ is a gratuitous waste of money.  The 811 already lets you 
burn it on the fly, what more could you want? 8)

> 					Jordan

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
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